A dream of a throne; the story of a Mexican revolt
A historical novel features the Mexican revolution
Excerpt:
AT nightfall of a day in May 1833, there was lamentation in a fisher shut on the banks of the Mexican lake, Chapala. The shadows of St. Michael shill, which rises high and rocky out of the town s centre, had long since fallen across the Chapala plaza. The sun had set in red and gold, and the waves, as the darkness came on, were rising slowly. The hut was of adobe with a steep, thatched roof. Its rooms were two and its floors earthen.
There were many other huts like this in a long line to the east, and between them and the water stretched smooth brown sand where white nets, for two hundred yards, were extended on poles to dry. The nets should be taken down at this hour or earlier, and rolled into a ball, and the tiny black boat that should carry them into the lake a little later on rode restless and empty at the shore. The larger canoa, too, it is one sail furled, tossed yonder on the waves, unused for days, and the nets remained extended with the wind fluttering them.
A boy of fourteen years came out of the hut with a little bundle of rockets in his hand and sat down near a tree. He was much whiter of face than the majority of the inhabitants of this fishing village. His features were clearer cut and more intelligent. His eyes were deep and, at present, sad, for there were tears in them. The lake breeze dried the tears. He untied the rockets in absorption, the absorption of a man who has seen or dreamed much, and with none of the air of a child. He was dressed in a loose white, the common clothing of this simple person of the high tropics.
He wore sandals on his feet. He lit the rockets one by one with wax matches, and they shot into the air hissing and burst with sudden reports on the night s stillness. It somehow seemed a very solemn thing. There was no play in this.
The last of them left him in grief, as plainly written on his face as though he had added twenty years to his few. The crack, crack of the explosives in the air had aroused no one along the shore. The boats still rode uneasily and empty, and the nets fluttered untouched, like ghosts. In the hut, however, there was heard the loud wailing of a man, a hysterical wailing rather than a grief-stricken one, such that a philosophic listener would not have pitied long, for surely the mourner would soon recover and be as boisterous in another direction. A little girl of four years, in cotton dress oddly long, crept out, awe-struck, went to the boy where he still sat, and silently hugged him. Then she whispered: "What is he crying about, Vicente? What is the matter with her? Is she dead, brother Vicente? "
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